Storybench from Northeastern University's School of Journalism

Recent articles

How to build margin of victory election maps with Datawrapper

With the campaign for 2020 in full swing, it’s election map season. I was recently poking around Politico’s 2018 midterm election maps and thought I’d recreate their county-by-county Margin of […]

July 17, 2019July 17, 2019 Aleszu Bajak How to

Six digital skills all new journalists should consider learning and a road map to unlocking them

Quantifying the Twitter attacks on Kamala Harris during and following the Democratic debates

How to make a longform narrative podcast without breaking the bank

How to build a GIF of satellite imagery in R

Northeastern teams up with two leading local TV news organizations and Stanton Foundation for video news research project

Men are writing two-thirds of national stories about the 2020 presidential race

2020 Election Coverage Tracker

Quantifying the Twitter attacks on Kamala Harris during and following the Democratic debates

Media outlets have been quick to crown Kamala Harris the winner of last month’s Democratic debates thanks to a series of stand-out moments that included passionate storytelling and her pummeling […]

July 11, 2019July 11, 2019 Aleszu Bajak Election Tracker

Men are writing two-thirds of national stories about the 2020 presidential race

History repeats itself as women on the 2020 campaign trail receive more negative coverage than their male peers

Fox News’ obsession with AOC crowded out 2020 candidate announcements

What issues are 2020 candidates being mentioned with in the media?

Facebook political ads reveal an early but limited look at the Democratic playbook

We need deeper reporting and not just horserace coverage of Pete Buttigieg

Tutorials

How to build margin of victory election maps with Datawrapper

July 17, 2019July 17, 2019 Aleszu Bajak How to

How to make a longform narrative podcast without breaking the bank

How to build a GIF of satellite imagery in R

How to build a website with Blogdown in R

How to build a bubble chart of individuals mentioned in the Mueller report

How to model with gradient boosting machine in R

Behind the Scenes

How to build a multimedia sports feature for the New York Times

Urban dirt biking won’t be competing with the popularity of baseball or basketball any time soon, but the sport has gained serious traction in metropolitan areas over the last few […]

May 28, 2019May 28, 2019 Kade Krichko Behind the scenes, Interviews

How the Wall Street Journal reported on “The Price of Climate”

Mixing storytelling and science: Behind the scenes at Hakai Magazine

How WGBH spent a year revealing how many women work in Massachusetts politics

Why Sharon Machlis wrote a book on R for journalists

How Vox’s Alvin Chang explains complex topics, from science to politics

How WCAI’s Heather Goldstone makes science more approachable

Journalism schools need to focus on data, local news, social media and business models. Here are some that are.

May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 Alexander Frandsen Insights, Longform

Modeling networked media: Diagrams and graphics in John Wihbey’s The Social Fact

Six digital skills all new journalists should consider learning and a road map to unlocking them

July 15, 2019July 15, 2019 Daniel Hentz Roundups

Eight tools, datasets and resources from the Open Data Science Conference

Six tools showcased at NICAR 2019 that you should probably learn

NICAR: With the right tools, anyone can be a data journalist

Longform

Journalism schools need to focus on data, local news, social media and business models. Here are some that are.

It’s no secret that journalism is at a bit of a crossroads. With technology and media consumption habits changing constantly, the industry has been thrust into a state of near […]

May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 Alexander Frandsen Insights, Longform

The future of machine learning in journalism

Journalists improve coverage of memes with careful reporting

How the Palm Beach Post unearthed an opioid conspiracy with roots in Florida

Social media and news: The dilemma of our time

How The Washington Post designs its Snapchat stories

Making the interactive documentary “Oil to Die For”

What is Storybench?

Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data visualization and investigative journalism to virtual reality and the digital humanities. In addition to in-depth interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the classroom or newsroom.

Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

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Best of Storybench

How the Wall Street Journal visualized 500+ conflicts of interest of the Trumps

Women on the 2020 campaign trail are being treated more negatively by the media

Getting started with data visualization in R using ggplot2

Understanding what makes a visualization memorable

Using French wine reviews to understand TF-IDF, a measure of how unique a word is to a document

Research

Over the next two years we’ll be surveying the media’s coverage of the candidates and the issues. Follow along here.

The Reinventing Local TV News Project, from Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is analyzing the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggesting new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audiences. Read our inaugural post here.

Join us at Northeastern!

Want to write for Storybench and probe the frontiers of media innovation? Apply for one of our graduate programs at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

Rolling admissions, no GREs required and financial aid available. Email here.

Interviews

Pizza, Press & Politics is our weekly speaker series at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. Watch interviews with David Filipov, Mike Workman, Jenn Smith, Martha Durkee-Neuman, Susan Labandibar, John Ward, Marc Fortier, Carol Gregory, Ling-Mei Wong and Elana Gordon.

Collaborative, Open, Mobile

Over the last three years, Storybench has interviewed 72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers from around the world to provide an “under the hood” look at the ingredients and best practices that go into today’s most compelling digital storytelling projects.

They boil down to three key areas of emphasis: 1) highly networked, team-based collaboration; 2) an ethos of open-source sharing, both within and between newsrooms; 3) and mobile-driven story presentation. Read our paper here.